In the second book of Gregoy Maguire’s Another Day trilogy, young (and somewhat amnesiac) Rain says, “I’m learning there’s never a way home, only a way forward. So let’s take it.” The green granddaughter of Elphaba Thropp, Rain spends the first two books of her story far from home. In the wake of a very upsetting event, she departed for distant shores, taking Elphie’s broom and her powerful book, the Grimmerie, which Rain dropped in the sea.
But—as even twentysomething witches eventually learn—you can’t leave your past behind. (It’s also quite hard to get rid of a magical tome that would prefer not to be drowned, thank you.) Having made unexpected new friends, traveled across a strange land, and accidentally uncovered a family secret, Rain now has her own future ahead of her (and a good deal of her memory back). She is—almost—on her way back to Oz.
The Brides of Maracoor was an arrival; The Oracle of Maracoor a journey; and The Witch of Maracoor a destination. A destination is not always just a place; it can also be a person, and one in particular has been haunting Rain this whole time. In the final book of Maguire’s previous Oz series, a young man named Tip was revealed to be none other than Ozma Tippetarius, the long-missing ruler of Oz. But to Rain, Tip was her beloved, and this revelation brought with it more than your average amount of shock.
Rain has always been making her way back to Tip, to Ozma—she just had to go the really, really long way ‘round. That way involved mysterious brides, and harpies, and a blue wolf whose presence I rather miss; it involved the aged Wizard of Oz and a powerful artifact and the living bits of stories that appeared and vanished around the land of Maracoor Abiding. If the second book felt like Rain and her companions journeying further into myth, this one feels like she’s coming back out again—appropriately changed. There’s the matter of a seashell full of pollen that must be delivered to a specific place. There’s the fact that she remembers a lot more about her life now.
And there’s the matter of her changing relationships: with her Goose companion, Iskinaary, who finds a purpose of his own; with the Minor Adjutant Lucikles, who has accompanied Rain on the last non-broom-traveling leg of her journey; with her father, Liir, when she does go home; and with Tip-turned-Ozma, restored (or is she?) to her place in the Emerald City.
The first book of Another Day was about a lot of things, including the way stories can be used to control, and the things we find when we don’t know what we’re looking for. The second was a beautifully balanced story that encompassed myth, power, responsibility, family secrets, road trips, harpies, and climate-concerned tree folk—and still held an incredible amount of empathy for one heartbroken and powerful girl who maybe messed up the world when she tried to run away from her heartbreak.
In The Witch of Maracoor, Rain finds herself. She finds her own voice—one, notably, in which questions do not come with question marks—she finds herself in a bit of an affair, which is powerful and awkward and strange and playful. She finds her father, and his life has changed; she finds her grandmother’s old Nanny, troubled flying monkeys, and a girl who used to be a boy. She finds Oz, messy and familiar and strange, and she finds herself in it: her inheritance, her ancestry, her love.
Rain’s meandering journey is dreamy, odd, sometimes retrospective, but Maguire’s tone, and Rain’s voice, can be sharp, wise, practical. Unsentimental, for all that we’re going back to Oz, and going back to familiar territory. But he knows how to let her heart show (give this girl an animal companion and she will show you her whole heart), and he knows exactly, beautifully, how to draw his intimate yet world-spanning story to a close.
Rain gets a lot of advice in this book, my favorite piece of which comes from a source both questionable and welcome, an apparition (maybe?) who tells her, “What you say matters. What you do matters. Love whom you will, cherish them while you have the time, don’t give an inch when the bullies kick at your stilts. Kick back, and then give them a poultice if you’ve hurt them.”
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The Witch of Maracoor
It’s heartfelt, and it’s also practical. (A poultice!) This book, this series, is a coming of age tale about growing up and growing into your own power—recognizing that power whether you want to or not. Taking responsibility where you can, and making apologies where you need to. And it is about permission—the kind you can only give to yourself.
Maguire moves smoothly from a world of women controlled by men, to a world that breathes mythology, to some not entirely subtle not nevertheless gorgeous ideas about rain (lowercase) and fertility and love and finding the power to put yourself in the world on your own terms. Rain’s journey changes the world, but Rain has to change her inner landscape before she can go home and face the great changes in the person she loves. (Who, it must be said, has been processing her own changes under less than ideal circumstances, and who is so immediately endearing that I think, perhaps, we need a Tippa series next.)
You could say that Maguire rewrites the hero’s journey in this trilogy. You could also say that he finds another way for a green girl to be a revolutionary force—a way that lets her live, and live for herself, no less. The Another Day books are not, like the Wicked Years, a direct response to Oz, but something wilder and looser, set free of the constraints of one Wicked Witch’s tragic fate. Rain’s story is mythic, strange, wry, and down-to-earth, and it feels to me like something you absorb slowly, like water into damp soil. Some books you understand; some books you accept. This is the latter. It feels like a reminder, like a guidebook through rough times, and at the same time it reads like a dream. “I am altered for having read from it once or twice. I can’t help it. No reader throws off a book’s influence by mere intention,” Rain thinks of the Grimmerie. I know what she means; I am most certainly altered for having read these books.
The Witch of Maracoor is available from William Morrow.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Bluesky.
